This week's film reviews | Arts

Little Miss Sunshine

'Pop is an aspiring motivational guru, Mom's so distracted dinner's invariably KFC, Uncle Frank's a suicidal Proust scholar and here they all are, hurling toward a beauty pageant Olive has set her seven-year-old heart on winning...' Laura Barton delights in a quirky new American film

Snow Cake

There is something rather painful about watching Hollywood actors contorting themselves into Oscar-worthy poses, yet playing the ugly, the overlooked and the afflicted remains the trend. Here Sigourney Weaver is Linda, an autistic woman whose life is interrupted by the arrival of Alex (Alan Rickman) the driver in a car crash that has killed her daughter. Alex sticks around, and the pair form something of an awkward bond, while he also embarks upon an affair with Linda's neighbour, Maggie. It's an admirable sort of film, but Snow Cake never really takes off, instead sitting heavily and disappointingly leaden. LB

Right At Your Door

Since 9/11 the threat of terrorist attack has inspired several Hollywood movies. This superior example of the genre takes place in LA, where one innocent morning explosions downtown unleash a toxic cloud over the city. Lexi (Mary McCormack) is already en route to work when the bombs strike. Her frantic husband Brad (Rory Cochrane) becomes confined to their home as the city is placed under quarantine until scientists can determine precisely how dangerous the chemicals are. When Lexi reappears, ash-coated and patently unwell, Brad faces the dilemma of helping his wife or pursuing self-preservation. LB

Driving Lessons

This winsome Britflick has been given the nod to be this year's Calendar Girls - though whether that's just by virtue of being British and starring Julie Walters remains unclear. It's a gentle tale of a retired actress who befriends Ben, a 17-year-old boy wilting under his stiflingly religious upbringing. He starts doing odd jobs for her, she teaches him to drive, together they head to Edinburgh for a book reading. It's a charming little foray, certainly, that leaves the cockles thoroughly warmed. But one sometimes wishes that British cinema wouldn't always insist upon being so tooth-achingly kooky. Still, it's preferable to all those mockney gangsters... LB

Lady in the Water

The title might lead you to expect something a bit Chandleresque, but the only twist in M Night Shyamalan's latest picture is that there is no twist. The aqueous-toned Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) who saves apartment block superintendent Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) from drowning really is a "narf" from another world and there really are monsters out to get her. Cue much mumbo-jumbo talk of guardians, symbolists and the Tartutic. Given enough zip, movies can get away with anything, but Shyamalan's Lady, slower than a stunned mullet, is dead in the water. CB

Shanghai Dreams

This is an exceptional film, well worthy of winning the Cannes 2005 Prix du Jury. It follows the story of Wu Zemin and his wife Meifen, two of those who upped sticks from cities to go to the rural west of China in the 1960s, as the country crouched under fear of war with the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, Wu dreams of a return to his beloved Shanghai, but the intervening decades have brought considerable changes to both his country and his family; most notably to his daughter, who has fallen in love with a local factory worker and taken to dancing to pop music. Director Wang Xiaoshuai's cinematic style shares a subdued radiance with the work of Wong Kar-Wai. Go see it. LB

Harsh Times

Christian Bale is back playing another of his American psychos. Jim Davis is a Gulf War vet haunted by night-sighted visions of mayhem and so finding it hard to hold down a job on civvy street. So when a stash of ganja and a stack of guns comes his way you know he's headed for trouble. What stops the movie sinking into predictability is Jim's friendship with Mike (Freddy Rodriguez), another sad sack who may or may not find redemption in the arms of Sylvia (Eva Longoria from Desperate Housewives). CB

Odd Man Out

Fifty years old, and the most up-to-the-minute picture in town, Carol Reed's thriller is an Oirish noirish tale of callous cops and sympathetic terrorists. James Mason - all velvet voice and cheekbones - plays Johnny, a gang-leader breezily planning to rob a local factory. Alas, during the job Johnny takes a bullet and spends the rest of the movie sinking into delirium. Reed's evocation of that delirium - soft-focus starry nights, slow-mo snow - can be sickly, but his shots of post-war Dublin, all oily blacks and lardy whites, are poetic without being precious. Not to be missed. CB

Volver

Pedro Almodovar hits his best form in a decade with a psychological thriller that gradually thickens into a supernatural swamp. Penelope Cruz is Raimunda, a down-at-heel cleaner married to a drunk with wandering hands. One night they wander onto Raimunda's daughter who responds by stabbing Pa through the chest and getting Ma to chuck him in the deep-freeze. For all its Spanish emphasis on the spectral and doomy, Volver manages to be charming, warm-hearted, humorous and life-affirming - and worth seeing just for what Almodovar has rightly called "the most spectacular cleavage in the world". CB

Miami Vice

Forget the neon glitz and nacreous sunsets of the original - Michael Mann's retake of his Eighties TV show is a sombre and sour policier that finds nothing remotely glamorous about the present-day drugs trade. Jamie Foxx is Ricardo Tubbs, Colin Farrell his sidekick Sonny Crockett. But the movie, bent on finding darkness everywhere, gives them nothing to do with one another except look mean. What they sound like is another question, because not one word of dialogue in this overlong (140 minute) picture is anywhere near audible. CB

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